Friday, March 26, 2010

There's a lot of FUD out there. For some reason, it seems like Java and JavaFX take a hard hit. I've heard nonsense like "no one uses Java anymore," and other such stuff. Unfortunately, some of the JavaFX FUD might be true: I recently completed a project which was little more than replacing a buggy, slow JavaFX UI for a Java applet with a fast, pure Java UI of the same applet. Thank God we did, because the applet is way better now.

The JavaFX portion was, at one point, the largest JavaFX codebase in existance, and, indeed, the first serious large JavaFX project not funded by Sun. And the company I was working with dropped JavaFX for plain old Java.

Although I can't say what the project was, I can say that this is a project that most companies would have tried to use Flash for, but, in the end, Java provided features that competitors using Flash simply can not offer. As far as I know, this company is now the only company with these features in a browser because they went with a Java foundation.

Now keep in mind that a large part of the problem, here, is that this was really the first major JavaFX project, so it was bound to have difficulties. We had support from Sun, but I think Sun did not realize how far they had to go and how many bugs they still had in their runtime. In my opinion, nobody, neither us nor Sun, was aware of the problems of JavaFX. Despite it's version number (1.1 when we started and 1.2 by the time we abandoned), we found it to be buggy. Had the version number been 0.7, I would right now be saying JavaFX is the coolest thing ever, but the truth is that it's still a nascent technology that has yet to prove itself.

Lack of Competent Developers

Symptomatic of a new technology, we had a hard time finding quality developers. Sun gave us some leads but these developers were simply not up to the task of building our complex app. JavaFX is not a difficult programming language, so having someone in-house learn it would have been preferable, but at the time we did not have the resources.

Performance

The performance of the JavaFX portion of our app was extremely poor. The extremely performance critical portions of the app were written in Java and performed well, but almost all the graphics were written in JavaFX. Basic graphics like buttons were okay, but complex drawing was very slow. I don't know for sure if this was a result of poor design or JavaFX itself, but from the code I perused it looked like a little of both. We know JavaFX was at least partly to blame because we had performance issues even when we commented out the complex calculations.

Unstable API

Transitioning from JavaFX 1.1 to JavaFX 1.2 turned out to be very difficult because of backwards compatibility issues. Unfortunately, at a certain point in our project, our app was performing so badly with even rudimentary graphics tasks that Sun and our JavaFX developers insisted on upgrading.

Lack of Quality Control

At one point, after we released a baseline product with minimal features, Sun released a new upgrade to JavaFX. Unfortunately, this meant that JavaFX libraries would be updated on all machines that ran our app. Since there was a bug in the library, our app stopped working.

Poor Developer Communication

In an effort to work around the bug, we asked Sun for the developer version of the new library. Unfortunately, they were not forthcoming. At that point, the decision was made to stop development on the JavaFX solution and seek an alternative. After I convinced the team that Swing was capable of looking great, we developed a pure-Java alternative and have released the new product. The graphics performance is orders of magnitude better, and the look is similar to Flash. People who have seen it so far have gone out of their way to complement the appearance of the app. The appearance matches the design spec almost perfectly except for a few things we have not yet had a chance to attend to. (I am belaboring this point because Swing has a reputation for being ugly, simply because most of the included Look and Feels are ugly)

Future Seems to Be Too Business Oriented

When asking Sun about the future of JavaFX, they said they plan to offer certification levels. It's bad enough that Java skills are based on memorization rather than problem solving abilities now, but I can sort of understand that given the business orientation of Java, and maybe businesses look for that sort of thing.

If hip kids don't learn Java, that's okay. There's more than enough Java programmers to keep Amazon, ebay, oracle and all those other Java giants going. But JavaFX is not like that. JavaFX is a creative tool. It's not a direct competitor to flash, but it's in the same vein, and those people aren't going to take a certification exam. Sun needs to think about what is going to make people think JavaFX is awesome, and certification is not it. Neither is having Gosling slinging T-Shirts at them. JavaFX really really has the potential to be awesome, and I really really want it to be, so here's what I think you need to do (Sun, I'm talking to you):

Show people that you are serious about making it awesome. Hire some awesome programmers and have them blog and tweet or whatever the cool kids are doing these days about what they are doing. Really. Hire the best. Hire some young folks. Hire some experienced old guns. Mix and match. Make sure you let them be honest on those blogs.

Talk to some cool startups that do mobile stuff like venmo about what they are doing in the mobile sphere and work with them proactively.

Suck it up: work with the android people. Sure they stabbed you in the back, but you need them.

Help out Apple: really, their JVM sucks. It seems like I am filing bug reports every week. Make sure they get it right because cool geeks use Apple.

While you're at it, make sure your JavaFX staff has Macs and other cool toys. Remember, you need to treat those folks as creatives, not code monkeys.